True Colors

by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock

  “Boy, am I full,” I said, patting my stomach. “Can’t eat another bite.”

  Hannah kept right on eating.

  “I don’t suppose that cat has anything to do with you leaving food on your plate all of a sudden?” she said.

  I sighed. Fooling Hannah was harder than teaching a frog to play a fiddle.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, and Hannah smiled.

  “You can give her some of my chicken, too,” she said. She had a soft heart, that Hannah. It was that soft heart that had made her give our trip money to the Trombleys. But I also knew that soft heart had made her take me in, too.

  Hannah went off to her weekly quilting club meeting while I washed the dishes. I turned on the radio to hear Fibber McGee and Molly, but instead President Truman was talking about sending more troops into Korea, so I turned it off and took the bowl of chicken out to leave for the cat.

  The night air was so chilly I changed my mind about swimming. Nadine wouldn’t go in, with it being this cold, and I didn’t feel much like it anymore, either. I stood looking up into the starry night and listened to the bullfrogs sing from the lake.

  Overhead, the Milky Way looked like a river flowing through the dark sky, and the stars hung so low and bright it seemed I could catch them on my tongue, like snow-flakes. I wrapped one of Hannah’s quilts around me and sat on the porch in the starlight, hoping to get a glimpse of the cat. I fell asleep without seeing her, but the bowl was empty in the morning.

  chapter 7

  Sundays were a day of rest, so in the summer, after chores and milking, and two long (and I mean loooong) hours of church and Sunday school, I’d always spent the whole afternoon with Nadine. Mostly we swam, but sometimes we wrote and put on plays, or took picnics up Black Hill, or rode Dolly and played cowboys and Indians. Sometimes we stopped by the town ball field and watched the old-timers play.

  “I can’t believe you’re not allowed to play baseball or cards on Sunday,” Nadine said. “I’m glad I’m not a Presbyterian.”

  I hated having to dress up for church (I was sure God wouldn’t mind if I wore my overalls, but Hannah didn’t see it that way), and it was awfully dull sitting through Reverend Miller’s sermons, but when Nadine described her church—first Communion, confession, and how she had to give up her favorite things, like candy and ice cream, for Lent—well, I thought I was getting off easy being a Presbyterian. And the best thing about church was that the Wright brothers weren’t there. I figured even God would keel over if the Wright brothers ever showed up.

  The old Nadine had liked baseball, even though she wasn’t very good at it, but the new Nadine acted as if it bored her, so I didn’t linger long at the ball field, even though I wanted to. I loved baseball. I was the best player at school, and always got picked captain when we were choosing teams, and Hannah and I listened to Red Sox games on the radio. Sometimes Nadine would toss a ball with me, but I mostly ended up chasing after it. Nadine threw, well, like a girl.

  We could always count on Raleigh being at the ball field too, seeing as how both teams let him be their batboy, and like always, he came running over to me.

  “Blue True,” he said.

  “Why’s he call you that?” Nadine asked.

  “I think he’s trying to say true-blue,” I answered. I hadn’t told her about the Wright brothers and the heron. “He’s just got it backward.”

  Raleigh stood patting Dolly until Esther Green came by pushing her baby, Rodney, in his stroller to watch her husband play ball. Rodney was just about the homeliest thing I’d ever seen, but Esther seemed to like him.

  Raleigh liked him, too. He liked all babies. He’d rush over to pick up Rodney, cuddling and cooing and making faces to get Rodney to smile. The way Raleigh held Rodney reminded me of how he’d cradled that hurt heron.

  Nadine wrinkled her nose.

  “That Raleigh gives me the creeps,” she said. “I wouldn’t let him anywhere near my baby.”

  I stared at her, too shocked to say anything. The old Nadine would never have said something so mean. Raleigh couldn’t help being the way he was.

  When Rodney started to cry, Raleigh put him over his shoulder and jostled Rodney up and down, patting him gently on the bottom until he stopped crying.

  I felt my eyes sting. Even Raleigh knew how to take care of a baby. Why hadn’t my own mama been able to do it?

  “What’s the matter?” Nadine asked.

  “Nothing,” I answered, blinking fast. “Let’s go.”

  Besides me not being allowed to play baseball on Sundays, Nadine couldn’t believe that I didn’t get an allowance. I hadn’t even known what an allowance was until I’d met Nadine. Nadine didn’t have any chores, and she still got an allowance, and if Mrs. Tilton asked her to do a chore, Nadine could usually get out of it by faking being sick. Mrs. Tilton would ask her to pick up her socks, and Nadine would groan and say her stomach hurt “something terrible.” Mrs. Tilton would feel Nadine’s head, cluck “Poor baby” a few times, and make her some chamomile tea.

  Hannah would never have fallen for that. I’d tried once, on a day when we were to have a vocabulary test, moaning and saying I felt sick. Hannah hadn’t said a word, just set the bottle of castor oil up on the cookstove to warm, and I’d scuttled off to school. I didn’t dread vocabulary tests nearly as much as I dreaded castor oil.

  Nadine had her mother wrapped around her little finger, but she and her mom had fun, too, little things like making cookies and cupcakes, and big things like taking trips to Montreal to eat out, visit the botanical gardens, and shop for new dresses. I didn’t like cooking, and hated dresses with a passion, but I envied the time they spent together. Mrs. Tilton had invited me along once, last summer, but Hannah and I’d had hay to get in. I was hoping they’d invite me again this summer. I’d never been to Montreal. Nadine said everyone spoke French up there. If I went with them, I’d try out a little of the Quebecois French I’d learned from listening to the kids at school.

  Nadine’s father could be really fun, too. Besides teaching us how to build a campfire, he’d taken us fishing (Nadine hated worms and cleaning fish, but I didn’t mind), showed us how to do jackknives and back dives off the raft, and even taught us Morse code. He taught us how to dance, too. Nadine and I were more interested in the jitterbug and swing than in slow dances (who wanted to hold hands and dance close with a boy, anyway?), but when I watched Nadine stand on her daddy’s feet while they waltzed around the kitchen, I felt tears prickling my eyes and had to bite my lip. What would it be like to dance with my daddy? I wondered.

  Some nights, when we were lying out under the stars, Nadine and I played “What’s your favorite thing?”

  “Favorite food?” Nadine would ask.

  It was always hard to pick just one.

  “Sugar on snow,” I decided. “Green apples, too.”

  Eating green apples always made Nadine’s mouth pucker up, and she didn’t like it that she wasn’t here in the spring when we were sugaring, so she’d never tasted sugar on snow.

  “Well, mine is peach cobbler and pecan pie,” she said. She knew I’d never had those, either.

  “Favorite smell?” I asked next.

  “The ocean,” Nadine said.

  I’d never been to the ocean, so I didn’t know it had a smell all its own.

  “Mine is lilacs,” I said. “And fresh-cut hay.”

  “My favorite sound is the ocean, too,” Nadine said.

  “Mine is spring peepers,” I said. “And Canada geese. And cowbells.”

  Hannah heard us one night and said her favorite sound was her grandfather playing the bagpipes. I wished I could have heard that, so that could be my favorite sound, too.

  Somehow, I didn’t think the new Nadine would want to play “What’s your favorite thing?” this summer, and if she did, I had a feeling her answers would be very different.

  When I fed the cat that night, I wondered how she would answer if she could.

  “What’s your favor
ite sound?” I asked her, then answered in a high voice.

  “Mice squeaking,” I said.

  The cat tilted her head to one side, listening.

  “And what’s your favorite smell?” I asked her, answering again in the high voice.

  “Mouse pie!” I said.

  My bark of laughter scared her, and she dashed off.

  “Well, if you didn’t want to play, you could have just said so,” I called after her.

  I didn’t see Nadine again until Friday. With three days of dry weather, Hannah and I worked straight through haying. I didn’t even have time to go swimming, but Friday was raining, so I got to spend that whole day with Nadine. (Rain on the roof was one of my favorite sounds, too. I couldn’t have told you whether it was really the sound or because it meant that we couldn’t hay.)

  She seemed like the old Nadine again (I’d come up with another idea to explain her two personalities—maybe Mr. Tilton was working on a secret government formula, and Nadine accidently drank some, and now she was two people in one, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), and I thought I’d better enjoy the old Nadine while I could. We played Chinese checkers and Monopoly, Old Maid, and Go Fish, and played every one of her records on the hand-cranked Victrola. Then we were out of things to do.

  “Let’s go up in the attic,” I suggested. I loved snooping through boxes and trunks to see what treasures other people had in their attics.

  Even the old Nadine was scared of attics and cellars (she hated mice, and spiders, and bugs of any kind), but she didn’t like to admit it, and since she couldn’t think of anything better to do, she shrugged and followed me up the stairs.

  chapter 8

  It was dark and dusty up there, like most attics, with boxes that mice had chewed into, a chair with a broken armrest, picture frames, and piles of crumbling books. We found an old trunk. Nadine tried to scare me by saying there might be a body in it, just like in Arsenic and Old Lace, but all we found was worn-out dresses and hats. They were faded and smelled musty, but we tried them on anyway, laughing at each other, and it felt like old times. At first, we pretended to be the crazy elderly aunts in Arsenic and Old Lace, then Nadine threw a feather boa around her neck and strutted across the attic like Bette Davis.

  The lace around my collar was scratchy, and I tugged at it.

  “Boy, I’m glad we don’t have to wear clothes like this anymore,” I said. I liked my frayed shirts and faded overalls.

  Nadine didn’t say anything, but I could tell from the way she twirled the skirts back and forth that she would have loved to wear clothes like that all the time.

  We put the clothes back in the trunk and snooped in some of the boxes, but there wasn’t anything interesting in them, just Christmas ornaments and some old dishes wrapped in crumpled-up newspapers (I didn’t tell Nadine that the mice had made nests in them). We played with the spinning wheel, which made me think of a propeller on an airplane.

  “Let’s play we’re paratroopers, dropped behind enemy lines,” I suggested, and I thought Nadine was going to go for it, but when she saw that meant crawling on our bellies across the dirty attic floor, she changed her mind.

  Instead, she picked up one of the magazines, an old Reader’s Digest.

  “We can play school,” Nadine said. “I’ll be the teacher and see how many of the words you know from ‘It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.’ ”

  I stared at her in disbelief. The old Nadine would never have suggested that; she knew how much I hated school, especially vocabulary tests.

  I never did well on Miss Paisley’s vocabulary tests. We had to give both the correct spelling and the definition, so I was pretty much doomed from the start. I was always getting mixed up on words like receive, niece, and sleigh and all those rules to follow like “i before e except after c,” and those were easy compared to the ones Miss Paisley gave us, words like propitious and pernicious and perspicacious, which doesn’t have anything to do with perspiration, but it should. That word made me sweat just hearing it! Perspicacious means “having keen judgment or understanding,” but I couldn’t figure out why we needed to know words like perspicacious. I’d never heard anyone use that word, and it seemed to me that if you had keen judgment, you wouldn’t be throwing around a word like perspicacious, which probably gave you a good chance of getting a knuckle sandwich. I mean, I couldn’t exactly see myself saying to Dennis or Wesley Wright, “It would not be perspicacious of you to steal my lunchbox.”

  Perspicacious had thrown me into such a panic that when I remembered how Sally Morley’s nosebleed had made Robert Perkins faint dead away and Miss Paisley had been so busy tending to both of them that she’d given us recess the rest of the afternoon, I figured I had nothing to lose and closed my eyes, leaned sideways, and landed with a thud on the floor.

  Sally gasped, and little Mary Richardson started crying, but Miss Paisley didn’t even look up from her desk.

  “We can do without your histrionics, Blue,” she said.

  Apparently, I had not been perspicacious enough to realize Miss Paisley wouldn’t fall for that. At least she didn’t put histrionics on the test, but I got a C– anyway.

  Miss Paisley also threw words like ptarmigan at us. How’s a body to know that ptarmigan has a silent p at the start? After that, when she said tolerant, I thought, Aha! She’s trying to fool us. It must have a silent p, too.

  It doesn’t. I got a D+ on that test.

  I thought Miss Paisley should be more tolerant about letting me spell words the way I wanted. If the English could throw in extra letters, why couldn’t I?

  So you can see why I was not interested in “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.”

  “Crepuscular,” Nadine said. “Does it mean (a) having to do with an infection, (b) pertaining to the abdomen, (c) happening at twilight, or (d) absorbent?”

  It sounded like a word Miss Paisley would give us, but I couldn’t remember ever hearing it, so I chose (a).

  “Nope,” said Nadine. “Twilight. Fireflies are crepuscular insects, for example.”

  The only person I could imagine using a word like crepuscular was Miss Paisley. Or Nadine. Or Mr. Gilpin.

  “Okay, how about auspicious?” Nadine said.

  I was pretty sure Miss Paisley had put auspicious on a vocabulary test, but I couldn’t remember what it meant.

  “Somebody who’s guilty?” I said.

  “Wrong,” said Nadine. “You’re thinking suspicious. Auspicious means ‘promising’ or ‘encouraging,’ like an auspicious beginning.”

  “Beginning of what?” I muttered, but Nadine ignored me.

  I found out that avuncular meant “being like an uncle,” cantankerous was another word for “crabby” or “cranky,” and filch meant “to steal something of little value.”

  “Wow,” said Nadine. “I can’t believe you haven’t gotten a single one right.”

  I was beginning to feel cantankerous with both Reader’s Digest and Nadine and didn’t want to play the game anymore, but Nadine was just getting started.

  “For Christmas, I got a book on phobias,” Nadine said. “Do you know anyone with a phobia, a fear of something?”

  I was afraid of the Wright brothers and vocabulary tests, but those probably didn’t count as real phobias. I’d never told Nadine about my fear of clowns, even though the old Nadine wouldn’t have made fun of me.

  I wasn’t so sure about the new Nadine.

  “Raleigh’s afraid of water,” I said. I didn’t really feel right telling her that, but I didn’t see how it would hurt.

  “That’s hydrophobia,” Nadine crowed. “It’s another name for rabies, because animals that have rabies are afraid of water. It makes them choke. Then there’s lygophobia, that’s fear of the dark, and ophidiophobia, fear of snakes”—Nadine shuddered when she said that—“and phalacrophobia is the fear of becoming bald. Triskaidekaphobia is the fear of the number thirteen, pupaphobia is the fear of puppets, and gephyrophobia is the fear of crossing bridges. I coul
d tell you all of them.”

  She would have, too, if Mrs. Tilton hadn’t called us down for lunch. That was another thing different about Nadine’s family. What they called lunch was our dinner, and their dinner was our supper.

  As soon as Nadine turned to go downstairs, I filched one of the Reader’s Digests and crammed it into my waistband. My plan was to memorize all the words in “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power,” and next time we played, I’d show Nadine she wasn’t the only one who could throw around big words.

  As I turned to follow Nadine, a word on one of the crumpled-up newspapers caught my eye: STOLEN! I tucked the piece of paper in my pocket and went down to lunch.

  Mrs. Tilton had our plates all ready at our places. I slid into my chair and picked up my fork. Nadine used hers to prod the suspicious lump on her plate.

  “Don’t poke at your food, Nadine,” Mrs. Tilton said. “It’s not polite.”

  “What is it?” Nadine asked.

  “Waldorf salad,” Mrs. Tilton said. “I thought we’d have something nice and light.”

  I’d never heard of Waldorf salad, and even though it didn’t look like any salad I’d ever seen, I liked salads, so I took a bite. I’d only chewed twice before I realized I was in trouble. Not only was I going to have a hard time getting the food down, I was going to have a hard time keeping it down.

  Apples, celery, grapes, and walnuts, all together in one dish. I loved fruit, and I loved vegetables; I just didn’t like them mixed together, and to make it even worse, they were covered with mayonnaise.

  Mrs. Tilton chattered on, not noticing my distress.

  “I’m fixing sautéed sweetbreads for dinner,” Mrs. Tilton said. “Have you had them before, Blue?”

  I gave my head a little shake, afraid of spewing Waldorf salad all over her.

  “Well, I hope you’ll join us later and try them,” Mrs. Tilton said. “I think it’s important to try new things.”

  Mrs. Tilton went into the pantry to get a pitcher of ice water, and I spit the Waldorf salad into my napkin. I’d worry about how to dispose of it later.